Squiggle birds is a quick exercise that you can use to get people stretching their visual thinking muscles. It takes about five minutes and quickly, clearly demonstrates how little effort is really required to make meaningful, easy-to-read images. The main…

My friend Marcia Conner, an admitted “word person” has been honing her visual thinking skills. She asked me “How can I recognize when I should be drawing an idea, versus communicating it some other way?” Watch my conversation (and sketching)…

Visual thinking, originally uploaded by dgray_xplane. People often ask me how to visualize information. They ask things like “How can I visualize my industry ecosystem?” or “How can I visualize how my product works.” My first instinct is to try…

Part of my exploration of visual literacy is looking at how we might teach people to express themselves visually. Part of this is learning how to draw simple objects. This video shows how you can draw a car using very…

In this short video (about seven minutes) I introduce some basic principles of visual language: Forms, fields and flows. I think of this as the “alphabet” of visual language. This set of principles is the primary set of marks you…